Week 1
Meaningful, Memorable, and Motivational.
My thesis is this: Instructional design is a profession requiring study and mentored practice to achieve excellence. If learners are going to exchange their time for the learning outcomes an instructional event provides, we have an obligation to make that time productive. It doesn't take many learners for the accumulated usage time to become significant. Employers need to take note here that broadcasting poor instruction quickly becomes a huge expense in both direct costs of employee time (even without factoring in costs of delivery) and indirect 13 costs of missed opportunities because people were in training and unavailable to work. As the number of students rises, the need to make instruction effective becomes paramount; yet, decision makers who insist on frittering money away on hastily produced, time-wasting training somehow overlook this, preferring to ask how much training costs can be reduced further.
"I often close my critique of a student's work with the question "Are you having fun?" I often close my email with the axiom 'Instructional Design is Fun!' and Michael Allen provides a way for those assigned to design e-learning to have fun creating learning experiences that will help their learners have fun as they acquire the skills being taught. As he notes e-learning has become pervasive but, as he also correctly observes, way too much of this flood of online instruction is boring, ineffective, inefficient, and expensive because it wastes the student's time and does not accomplish the goals of the organization providing the training. Michael's Guide to e-Learning is a very pragmatic approach that attempts to provide a simple way to design instruction that is meaningful, motivating and motivational while painlessly implementing the best that research has to say about effective, efficient and engaging instruction. This guide is a must read for everyone who is tasked to design e-learning whether trained instructional designers or designers-byassignment. You'll be glad you did. Keep smiling!"
—David Merrill
1. Ensuring learners are highly motivated to learn
2. Guiding learners to appropriate content
3. Providing meaningful, memorable, and motivational learning experiences
Mobile Performance Support
versus m-Learning
Mobility can make other kinds of learning unnecessary. Reference guides on devices using GPS...
Allen, M. W. (2016). Michael Allen's guide to E-Learning: Building Interactive, fun, and effective learning programs for any company. Wiley.
context, challenge, activity, and feedback (CCAF).
My thesis is this: Instructional design is a profession requiring study and mentored practice to achieve excellence. If learners are going to exchange their time for the learning outcomes an instructional event provides, we have an obligation to make that time productive. It doesn't take many learners for the accumulated usage time to become significant. Employers need to take note here that broadcasting poor instruction quickly becomes a huge expense in both direct costs of employee time (even without factoring in costs of delivery) and indirect
13 costs of missed opportunities because people were in training and unavailable to work. As the number of students rises, the need to make instruction effective becomes paramount; yet, decision makers who insist on frittering money away on hastily produced, time-wasting training somehow overlook this, preferring to ask how much training costs can be reduced further.
When all is taken into account, the total cost of boring instruction can be many, many times greater than the direct cost of e-learning development and delivery, and may easily soar to multiples of the combined costs of the poor e-learning when we consider also the hidden costs of providing on-the-job training to fix the damage done by the e-learning.
Success comes from more responsive customer service, increased throughput, reduced accidents and errors, better-engineered designs, and consistent sales.
How do things in e-learning run amok so easily? Two reasons: counterfeit successes (a.k.a., to-do-list projects) and undercover operations (a.k.a., on-the job training [OJT]).
If errors are necessary before a worker can get help, errors will have to be made and damages incurred.
Unfortunately, both smile sheets and knowledge tests are often flawed in their execution, providing dangerously misleading information.
Why do Trainings Fail?
Because: failure to scrutinize the training and performance context and take it into account during design.
• Who participates in the design of the training
• What resources are available for training design and development
• Who is being trained and for what reason
• Instructional delivery media and instructional paradigms used
• Learning support available during training
• Performance support and guidance available after training
• Rewards and penalties for good and poor performance, respectively
We must objectively assess the context for a learning solution to identify the real barriers to success.
Who are all the players? Training sometimes needs to be offered to suppliers, customers, buyers, and others.
Training development is never easy and success is never a given. But when the goal hasn't been defined, success is a miracle. If you don't know what success looks like, you're pretty unlikely to achieve it.
If we're talking about employee training, for example, employees may not be doing what management wants because doing something else is easier and seems to be accepted. In this context, training focused on teaching how to do what management wants done may have absolutely no positive effect. Employees may already know full well how to perform tasks in the manner desired, but they simply choose not to do so. The performance context needs to change. And in this situation, further training won't make a difference.
A well-nurtured learner is going to do much better with e-learning or any other learning experience than an isolated, ignored learner.
They are far more complex than you can imagine if you haven't yet been part of the process. If people are not available for needed input or reviews, it can be very disruptive, expensive, and ultimately damaging to the quality of the final product.
People no longer wonder whether e-learning is viable but, rather, how to convert to e-learning most expeditiously.
One instance of this is the concept of templates or reusable learning objects (RLOs).
Is lowering the quality of e-learning a fair trade-off to ease design, development, and maintenance? No. Simply said, poorly designed training is of little value, whether it's easy to author and maintain or not.
Intrigue, challenge, surprise, and suspense are valuable in creating effective learning experiences. The drama of learning events is not to be overlooked when seeking to make a lasting impression on learners. Just as we have not yet seen automated ways to create such elements in other media, it will be a while before e-learning evolves to automated creation. We still need to develop a greater understanding of interactive learning before we attempt to make courses by either automation or assembly-line production.
Without the rudder of research, creative design results in applications that are simply different and unusual but not necessarily effective.
We can take a pragmatic approach that depends on some creativity, intuition, and talent, to be sure, but also depends on experience as much as published research, intelligence, and an iterative process that includes experimentation and evaluation. These foundations work well, but they work well only for those who are prepared and armed with the knowledge of how they work together.
Management must understand that change is difficult, that there is inertia behind existing behavior patterns. Change will not be accomplished unless management provides strong intentional support for change.
Behavioral patterns are established in response to instructions, rewards, effort, available resources, perceived risk, observed behavior in others, team values, and so on.